Three Arch Rock Reservation. 
III.—Cormorants. 
Our camp was partly protected from above 
by the overhai>ging rock, which we thought 
would be fortunate in case of a storm. As we 
discovered later, this ledge was rather a dan¬ 
gerous protection, because disintegration was 
constantly going on. The movement of the 
birds on the cliff above often dislodged pieces 
of the basaltic structure. Often when we were 
in the midst of a meal or enjoying a few min¬ 
utes’ rest, we were startled by an avalanche 
of pebbles. Dropping everything, we would 
retreat under the ledge until the rain of stones, 
often as large as a good sized egg, had ceased. 
The novelty of the situation had a great deal 
to do with alleviating the hardships and the 
difficulties we had to encounter in living five 
days among the sea birds about the vertical 
side of the rock isle. 
We had brought two ten-gallon casks of 
fresh water with us. We reasoned thus: If 
we were storm-bound on the rock and had 
enough water to drink, we would not starve 
to death. According to the species of birds 
on the island, we made six different kinds of 
omelet. When the eggs were all hatched, if 
necessity compelled, we could dine on sea gull 
chicks, even if they were not spiced up in 
good marketable chicken-tamale form. 
The ledges were slippery and the rocks 
crumbly in many places. We could not climb 
along the shelves an hour without risking our 
lives in a dozen places. While camped on the 
rock we wore rubber-soled shoes, so we could 
cling to the surface with some degree of 
safety. But even with these, as we hung to 
the ledges, we often found our toe-nails in¬ 
stinctively trying to drive through the soles 
of our shoes to get a better hold. 
If it is the tinge for adventure in the Anglo-. 
Saxon veins you want to satisfy, you get it 
here on the rocks; if it is the love for nature, 
you find her as she is. Nature is perfect in her 
economy. There is not much poetry on the 
island. The adoration of many of the nature 
lovers who fall into ecstacies over the sweet 
singing of the birds and the lovely perfume of 
the June flowers would receive an awful blow 
the minute they got into the midst of an ear- 
splitting screaming murre rookery, or got the 
faintest sniff of the atmosphere. 
The Brandt cormorant is the only “shag” 
that is found on the outer rock where we 
camped. This species holds possession of the 
entire ridge, and they sit in groups at rigid 
attention beside their nests about the top 
edges of the cliff clear around the rock. 
When a young cormorant is born, he looks 
very much as if some one had covered him 
with a greasy black kid glove. The little 
beasts are not very pleasant to look at when 
you see them just coming out of the shell, 
but the gulls think these youngsters are the 
most palatable thing on the island. A nestful 
of them never lasts more than a few seconds 
if they are left unguarded. 
When I first looked at the motley crowds of 
half-grown cormorants that sat about in 
groups on the top of the rock, I thought 
nature had surely done her best to make some¬ 
thing ugly and ridiculous. They stand around 
with their mandibles parted, and pant like a 
lot of dogs after the chase on a hot day. The 
skin of the throat is flabby and hangs like an 
empty sack, shaken at every breath. Their 
bodies are propped up by a pair of legs that 
have a spread of webbed toes as large as a 
medium pan-cake. The youngsters have no 
very clear notion of what feet are for, at least 
CORMORANT PROTECTING HER YOUNG FROM A GULL. 
on land, for when you go near, they go hob¬ 
bling off like a boy in a sack race, using their 
unfledged wings as if they were a poorly 
handled pair of crutches. 
However awkward the young cormorants 
are on level ground, they are experts at climb¬ 
ing. I put one youngster down three feet be¬ 
low his nest and he scrambled up an almost 
perpendicular bank. His sharp claws easily 
caught into the rough surface of the rock, and 
he used his undeveloped wings like hands to 
hang on and help him up. When he got up 
to the edge of the nest he hooked his bill in, 
parrot fashion, and clambered over the rim. 
The cormorant is a ferocious looking bird, 
gaunt, two feet in height, with a green eye 
and a snake-like head and beak, but for all his 
looks he is timid and hard to approach. I 
spent all one morning trying to get a near 
picture of one. A quick motion is sure to 
make a shag take flight. By moving very 
slowly and edging up a few inches at a time, 
I got the camera within a few feet of one of 
the mothers as she sat beside her nest of half- 
grown young. 
Just as I held the camera in position for 
another picture, a gull sailed within six feet. 
The black mother instinctively spread her 
wings to ward off the danger from her nest¬ 
lings, and I clicked the shutter on her in this 
characteristic attitude. 
From the summit of the outer rock we could 
look directly across several hundred yards to 
the two inner rocks. The ridge of the middle 
rock is held almost entirely by a colony of 
Farallone cormorants, while the smallest 
shelves far up the sides of both the inner rocks 
are the homes of the Baird cormorant. The 
Farallone cormorant, it seems, is not satisfied 
with a grass nest, but collects a lot of sticks 
that have been worn smooth by the waves, and 
works them in for a foundation. The young of 
this species are easily distinguished from the 
others by the pinkish throat patch. 
The cormorants seemed to suffer most from 
the raids of the gulls. The instant a gull alights 
near a cormorant's nest, the owner of the 
nest takes the defensive by spreading her wide 
black wings in a protecting canopy over her 
eggs or young. She darts her long hooked 
bill at the intruder, who calmly composes his 
feathers and settles down into a statuesque 
silence. Gradually the fears are quieted in the 
black mother’s breast, her wings relax to their 
normal position, as the supposed foe seems to 
be only a friendly visitor. The gull is soon 
forgotten, as attention is taken up with others 
sailing overhead. The cormorant will never 
leave her nest unguarded unless frightened 
away by a person. The instant she does leave 
is the opportunity the gull is waiting for. He 
walks up, cocks his head on one side and in¬ 
spects the unguarded nest with the air of a 
connoisseur. At times I have seen him jab 
through the shell and devour the contents on 
the spot. Again, I have seen him pick up an 
egg, swallow it whole or make off with it in 
his bill. On one occasion I saw a gull pick up 
a small cormorant nestling by the wing, give it 
a shake and start to swallow it alive. It would 
not go down crosswise, but he grasped the 
kicking youngster by the head and gulped him 
down; the downward passage of the little fel¬ 
low was marked by a bulge in the throat, till 
he found a temporary resting place in the crop, 
where he looked to me quite out of place. 
Twice after this I saw gulls swallow young 
birds that seemed to me as large as their own 
heads. I have seen a gull pick up a murre’s 
egg, large as it is, hold it firmly in his mouth 
and fly away. I never saw a gull with a bill 
strong enough to penetrate the shell of a 
murre’s egg, but they know enough to drop the 
egg to a rock below and devour the contents. 
When the young cormorants are too large 
for the gull to. eat, if he finds them unpro¬ 
tected, the white thief will get a meal by 
making the youngsters disgorge. Often when 
